Paying lip service to the gender-equality myth

The result of this is a generation of young girls who think that their rights are innate and inalienable, when in actual fact many of their rights have only recently been obtained and, in some instances, are still highly vulnerable.

Perhaps one answer is to teach girls the history of their rights in high school. When I left school in 2001, I knew all about the civil rights movement in America, I’d successfully memorised Martin Luther-King’s “I have a dream” speech and I knew all about slavery and segregation. What I didn’t know was that Australian women had only relatively recently achieved the right to serve on a jury.

Our history books just didn’t cover that stuff and, even worse, when the history books did mention the experiences of women, it was often as an afterthought or in an addendum chapter titled something like “Women and the war” or “Women and the Depression” (as though all the other chapters applied to men and men alone).

Perhaps the school syllabus could include a compulsory module on the history of women’s rights in Australia, similar to the compulsory module on the history of Aboriginal experiences. And it would be great if the accompanying text book included a chapter on the history of the bikini.